The corporate responsibility to respect consultation rights in the Americas

C.Ignacio de Casas, Adjunct Professor of Public International Law and Inter-American Human Rights Law in the Faculty of Law, Universidad Austral, Buenos Aires discusses the corporate responsibility to respect consultation rights in the Americas.

The presentation addresses two pressing issues in the Inter-American Human Rights System, namely the responsibility of corporations to respect human rights, and the right of indigenous peoples to give or withhold free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) for the use of their lands. Both issues intersect in the extractive industry sector, where corporations impact indigenous peoples’ rights as they carry out their activities on the ancestral lands of these peoples.

We will discuss a proposal by Ignacio on how the Inter-American System can promote FPIC in the best interest of both Indigenous peoples and business enterprises in the Americas.

An audio recording of this event is available to listen to on Soundcloud

C. Ignacio de Casas is an adjunct professor at Austral University in Argentina, where he also coordinates the Graduate Diploma in Human Rights Law. Prior to that, he worked for a law firm focussing on human rights international litigation. He has law degrees from the University of Mendoza and University of Oxford and is a PhD candidate at Austral University. He is also co-founder of the Centro Latinoamericano de Derechos Humanos (CLADH).